Originally developed by government and universities, the Internet, a global computer network interconnecting numerous computers, is now used by virtually everyone with access to a computer (especially in North America). The Internet is particularly useful for electronic commerce and information exchange. Providing a foundation for electronic commerce and information exchange, the World Wide Web, or more commonly “the web”, is a massive collection of web servers and/or web pages which exist around the world and are interconnected by the Internet.
Each web server has access to the Internet or an intranet (or “private” Internet) and supplies services using web pages. A collection of one or more related web pages are commonly organized by a web site, or “site”. A web site can be as simple as a single web page concerning a single topic. Alternatively, a web site may include a myriad of web pages on a wide range of topics. Each web page, or “page”, may be thought of as a file found on a computer disk drive or remotely accessible from a web server. A web page is any computer file that conforms to a hypertext mark-up language (HTML) standard file format and presents information understandable to a human.
Within a web page are web links, or “links”, that are regions containing a graphical or textual representation and a uniform resource locator (URL) to another page on the web. When a user clicks on or otherwise selects the link, the web browser loads and displays the web page associated with the URL. A URL is essentially a computer address for a web page. URL is the standard for naming specific web pages and includes what protocol to use when retrieving the page, on which specific machine the web page exists and where on that machine's file system the page is stored. To access a web page, the user needs to know the URL of the web page, and each page on the web has its own distinct URL. For example, the URL for CBS News is “http://www.cbsnews.com”.
A web browser, or “browser”, is a program on a computer which enables the user to examine HTML web pages retrieved by URL over the web. When web browsing, or “browsing”, a web browser is used by a computer user to examine information on the World Wide Web. Due to the interconnected nature of web pages, provided by the aforementioned links, web browsing can begin on one page and topic and quickly deviate to other topics as the user's attention is swayed by attractive or interesting web links. Browsing can easily turn into aimless web wandering.
A user commonly connects to the Internet and uses the World Wide Web to find an answer to a specific question, to find entertainment, and to find current news/content. Most web pages are intentionally connected, via links, to other web pages, which are connected to other pages, and those to other pages, and so on. Regardless of the reason a user chooses to begin a web browsing session, the user typically explores at least some of those web links. The user commonly finds pages that the user has never seen before. With the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, many thousands of web servers and millions of web pages quickly sprouted. This explosion of web based content also created problems with locating user-desired information and tracking web pages of interest.
There are other ways that a person may find web pages. A user can find the URLs for potentially interesting web pages from movie marquees, television commercials, billboards, magazines/newspapers, and food packages. These web sites very often provide information, solicit consumer feedback, and market products. Well known search engines have also been created to provide web page URLs that are particularly useful when the user knows the topic of the desired pages but doesn't know where to find them.
A seemingly unlimited number of web pages have been developed that are based on an equally unlimited number of diverse topics. Faced with the difficulty of retracing the steps of a browsing session to find previously encountered interesting or relevant pages, several tools have been created to allow a user to keep a reference to the URL of a web page for browsing directly at a later time. To assist users in keeping track of which web pages a user has loaded/visited and which web pages the user might want to return to, the “Go Menu”, “History List”, “bookmarks”, and personal toolbar features have been added by most web browsers.
Go Menu tracks recently loaded URLs in a list format in an order of last in time that is cleared at the end of a web browsing session and is useful for returning to pages that the user visited. History List is a long-term storage version of the Go Menu feature that also includes a list of URLs. However, the History List feature maintains the list across different web browsing sessions until the items on the list expire or the user intentionally empties the list. The History List feature is useful for allowing the user to return to pages that were visited within the last few days. Unfortunately, the ability to organize the Go Menu and History List is out of the user's control. Additionally, Go Menu and History List only provide a temporary list of URLs. If the user desires to keep a URL for a longer term, other methods, which are all based on the bookmark concept, are available.
Most web browsers provide “backward”/“forward” buttons. In a web browsing session, the user typically visits many web sites in any arbitrary order by clicking on the links of the web pages. When the user begins the session, the backward, or “back”, button is initially inactive. Once the user chooses a web link and the browser loads the page associated with the link, activation of the back button returns the browser to the page the user was viewing immediately before the link was chosen. The forward button does the opposite of the back button and is inactive until the user activates the back button. After the user activates the back button, the forward button can be used to return the browser to the most recently loaded web page. Unfortunately, conventional backward/forward buttons are subject to the user's real-time selection of web pages and are provided to users merely as an “undo”/“redo” mechanism.
Bookmark, or “Favorites”, capture the URL of a single user chosen web page, along with the human readable title for that web page. Keeping a bookmark of a web page allows a user to permanently keep a record of the name and address of a web page for re-visiting in the future. Additionally, “Bookmarks List”, or “Favorites list” are provided by most browsers as a permanent storage for one or more user chosen bookmarks and may include a folder metaphor for organizing large numbers of bookmarks by category or theme. Alternatively, bookmarks may be stored on a personalized toolbar provided by some browsers, notably Netscape Navigator which is produced by Netscape.
Internet search sites, or “search sites” or “search engines”, and Internet portals, or “portals”, find and catalogue as many web pages as possible for users to search. In operation, a user supplies words to search for in web pages, and the search site returns a list of relevant pages. A search site may also provide lists (or menus) of different categories of web page topics which assist in leading the user to web pages of the user's interest.
An Internet portal is a mature web site that provides a wealth of typically unrelated but useful information. The consolidation of information into one web site makes the Internet portal a popular destination. The intent of the portal is to provide enough information so that the user does not need to leave the web site to find other information or entertainment. For example, a small sample of what conventional portals now provide includes: Internet web site searching, breaking news stories, stock quotes, up-to-date sports scores, horoscope information, lottery results and weather forecasts. In order to provide a user with convenient access to user desired web pages, most conventional portals provide a personal link as a substitute for the aforementioned browser based bookmark and a single personal list as a substitute for a browser based bookmarks list. Thus, conventional portals run afoul of the same problems as conventional bookmark concepts.
The bookmarks feature is well suited for web browsing when individual web pages are desired. This process includes deciding which web page to visit, finding the web page in the bookmarks list, and choosing the associated bookmark to load the page. However, if the user has a routine of looking at current web based news/content, and frequents one or more web sites which provide regularly updated information, the process becomes burdensome. In order to visit each of the desired web sites, the user must mentally recall which site is first in the user's routine, find and chose the bookmark, examine the web page (which may take an extended period of time based on whether the user decides to explore web links from that page), decide which of the intended sites in the routine have not yet been visited in this session and repeat this “hunt and click” process with the next site in the routine until all the desired sites have been viewed. This process is time consuming, mentally taxing and subject to mistakes of memory, especially if the user's routine consists of more than three pages. Although, the user can type each of the URLs associated with the web pages into the browser one at a time and forego using bookmarks altogether, this would merely cause more inconvenience, inefficiency and time consumption.
What is therefore needed is a system for navigating through a list of routinely visited web pages with a browser that is convenient and efficient. More particularly, what is needed is a system for navigating through a list of URLs or web pages with a browser that allows a user to specify the list content and list order. Further needed is a system that allows the user to navigate through the list of web pages according to the user specified order using a “Next/Previous” paradigm.